Art of Your...Wooorrld!

A couple of years ago I started thinking about grad school.  I'd previously never thought much about this topic besides a.) a resounding "Hell, no!" and when I was in a less rigid frame of mind, b.) that if I ever did go back to school, I'd study art, not education.  But, well, life is funny.  After teaching for 11 years I started thinking maybe there was more I needed to know, that I could become a more effective art teacher if I had more education.  So when I heard about the University of Nebraska - Kearney's MA in art education (and more to the point, saw the courses and realized they were almost all things I wanted to study), I figured the time had finally come to return to academia.

"The Floating World"

That said, academia isn't exactly my favorite thing.  When I was at UMKC, my art classes were effortless.  My education classes, on the other hand...I struggled with them.  So when I was signing up for my first class last summer, I decided to start with one of the two studio courses that were part of my program - painting.  This may seem like the kind of course that needs to be taught in a traditional setting, but our professor structured it so that each of us completed our own work each week, then uploaded it to the class blog, and provided feedback to each of our classmates about their work.  In this way, we got to know each other pretty well, and seven of us decided we wanted to keep in touch through facebook to continue working.

"Triggered"

One of the aspects of the class that was really interesting to me was that we each chose our own objectives and developed in the direction we chose.  A big one for me was exploring new media - most of my painting has been in acrylic, and didn't really experiment with layering or using mixed media, so I wanted to work with those.  Having just moved to Japan and being sort of a weeb, I decided I wanted to explore Japan's art and culture through my paintings.  I tried to be relatively mature about it and not jump straight into anime characters, but I also wanted the influence to be clear.  I started on my first piece shortly after seeing the Harajuku Super Yosakoi.  I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try to capture the energy of the day, and their expressions...but it kept falling flat.  I wanted to have more going on than just the central figure, so I started building up the background with some dancers and repetitive shapes and colors using washi paper.  It wasn't exactly what I wanted, but I guess I wasn't entirely sure of what I wanted.

My second piece was to be a tribute to the Kawaii Kingpin - not only did he get me hooked on anime (and, by extension, on the idea of living in the motherland), but when I thought I was going to be unemployed this year he still had faith that I'd not only find a job, but that I'd be in Japan.  His dragon came together pretty quickly conceptually - I've drawn enough dragons in the course of my life, and seen plenty in Japan.  Executing the damn thing, on the other hand...somebody got it into her head that it would be awesome to try and weave the painting in and out of the washi paper to try and show the depth of the water.  The length of the dragon led me to break it into a triptych, and after a first attempt, I decided that I would paint him in layers, transparently, adding layers of thin washi in between, gradually making him more solid as I came up.  It was a huge pain in the ass, and there are a few parts I still need to work out, but on the whole I'm pretty happy with it. 

When I got to my final piece, I'd restrained myself enough.  It was time to get animated.  After seeing painted ema at several different shrines, I decided to make my own.  You purchase these wooden votive tablets to write your wishes on, and so my final work would be a self-portrait expressed through my wishes - past as well as present.  I thought I might stop using the washi paper on these, but when I got the first painting done I realized I really liked what they added to the look of the work.

"May Our Fates Intertwine"

The thing about this piece is that I wanted it to be an installation - I've been interested in this kind of sculpture since I was in college looking at my first Chihulys and Skoglunds.  There's a park essentially in my backyard, Baba Kabokuen, and so for my final submission I took my (mostly) finished paintings over and hung them in a tree to kind of show the idea of what I was going for.  I'm planning to paint a lot more of these, though - I was really inspired by Shiota Chiharu's The Key in the Hand at the 2015 Biennale and would like to make it something much more immersive.  But that's in the future.  For now, I've got a 4.0 GPA (yes, this was only my first class in my master's, and I was only taking one class...nevertheless...), a drypoint plate downstairs ready to print, and the nagging feeling that maybe I should have gone back for art rather than education...I really, REALLY enjoyed taking the painting course and maybe have some dread about taking a more traditional class.